Rafferty: Water: the last of the great bargains

Published 8:43 pm, Friday, August 22, 2014

If you don't mind, I'd like to talk about a certain natural resource. Doing so, let's put aside for the moment any discussion of climate change or whether or not you want to see investments in green energy. Let's at least acknowledge the very real fact that all terrestrial resources are finite. Oil, gas, uranium, coal...these are all things that once they're gone are really gone. But the natural resource I want to talk about is water. Sure, we have lots and lots of the salted variety, but it's the fresh stuff I'm interested in. The stuff you need everyday to, you know, live. See, clean, drinkable water is most definitely a natural resource that is limited, and according to many experts, dwindling.

I was going through my bills recently and was struck by something that didn't make any sense. We pay serious money to gas and electric companies to provide us with heat and power. And while we often grumble about the cost, we've learned to recognize that for the most part we use expensive fossil fuels and other un-renewable resources to civilize our lives. Fair enough. But then I looked at my Aquarion bill and thought, gee, all my water bills in a year don't even add up to one average electric bill.

My first thought was that my electric must be too high, but on further reflection I came to realize that my water bill is simply too low. Way too low. Like, criminally low. So I decided to take a closer look, but it's hard to compare electric generation rates to cost per gallon for water because it's apples and oranges and seriously, who really knows what Northeast Utilities` generation rates even mean? But costs per gallon, that's something I can compare and contrast.

Today, gasoline costs about $3.80 a gallon, and I have a pretty good idea what I get for a gallon of gas. Bottled water, according to industry averages, costs the consumer (who regularly buys in single serve bottles) about $7.50 a gallon. Okay, so we're happily willing to pay twice as much for drinking water than we grudgingly pay for fuel. So how much do we pay for a gallon of water from the tap? According to the American Water Works Association, the average cost of tap water is $0.0004 a gallon.

Seriously? That ten-minute shower my mom yelled at me about for costing so much money really cost only a penny? Well, not only am I going to have a bone to pick with my mom, but in reality, that shower should cost a lot more. Know who else thinks so? Aquarion.

Last year, Aquarion came before the county and the town to try to sell a 23 percent rate increase, and it didn't work out so well. Their presentation was a loser, their rationalizations were laughable and even the edited transcripts contained so much blah-blah that the villagers immediately got out the pitchforks and torches. Give us more money, they said, because our multi-national faceless corporation needs it. Meanwhile, what they should have been saying was, pay more for your water because it's a finite resource that we have to preserve and defend while investing in trying to safely and cost-effectively find more of it.

The Department of Agriculture has identified seven states as currently running out of water and the Government Accountability Office expects 40 states to be faced with severe shortages in the next decade. Yet water remains stunningly cheap. There's no incentive not to use it. Water costs so little we never consider price when watering a lawn or letting the shower run while shaving. We need to start looking at water much the same way as we look at our other depletable resources. We're going to have to seriously consider if anonymous shareholder-beholden firms like Aquarion actually have the community's best interests at heart, or if we'd be better served by local companies who consider themselves stewards of our resources rather than exploiters.

We've lived through the oil shocks of the '70s when the gas pumps were turned off, how'd you like to live in a time and place when the sink taps were turned off?